


as we fight the sight of daybreak

by bokutoma



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Crowley Is A Pine Tree In Sunglasses, Crowley is Bad at Feelings (Good Omens), Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Pre-Scene: Body Swap (Good Omens), Soft Aziraphale (Good Omens), Soft Crowley (Good Omens), Worried Aziraphale (Good Omens), i'm sorry crowley i didn't mean to call you a bitch, who's going too fast now BITCH, yes it's another one of those shush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-24 22:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22285225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bokutoma/pseuds/bokutoma
Summary: aziraphale didn't love crowley like crowley loved aziraphale, but that was alright.crowley would keep him safe anyway.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 120





	as we fight the sight of daybreak

**Author's Note:**

> a commission for the lovely kuuma!! thank you for making this possible <333
> 
> this is my first gomens fic...fingers crossed y'all like it lol

Love had not been a notion that had ever appealed to Crowley, tiring and trite as it was. Many centuries had been spent twisting it to nefarious purpose, and for all that true love was espoused as life's North Star, he'd never struggled in bending it to his whim. A wandering eye here, the promise to do anything to keep a lover safe there, and a bond that humans claimed as the most sacred ideal all too quickly unraveled.

The thought of falling in love wasn't close to what he'd wanted at all, considering how close it was to the Almighty's Grace, but when Crowley could no longer deny how much he loved Aziraphale, these reminders were all that kept him from giving himself away.

Aziraphale loved; he loved more deeply and completely than any being Crowley had ever known, occult, ethereal, or otherwise. Crowley had been dragged to more handfastings and weddings over the ages than he'd ever have willingly attended, even if they _were_ an excellent place to foment chaos and sow discord, and modern, public proposals were some of the angel's favorite events to bless. Someone, the soft bastard has cried at a _promposal_ before, and it hadn't even been a good one (far too little panache).

So Aziraphale loved; he did not love Crowley the way Crowley loved him.

That was okay, though. The two of them had done six thousand years like this already, six thousand years of one-sided longing, and any resentment that Crowley might have harbored had long since burned away. What he had gotten had been far more than he truly deserved, and Aziraphale's friendship sang more sweetly than any celestial choir could hope to.

What luck he had, to have found and been found by Heaven's best angel.

And still, greedy Crowley, cursed to crawl on his belly for all eternity had finagled even more. The years he'd spent at Aziraphale's side in some approximation of daily domesticity, two humans under the employ of the Dowling household, had been the highlight of his forever-cursed life. She'd been quite fetching as Nanny Ashtoreth, she'd always thought, and though Brother Francis had been considerably less so, she'd taken great pains to flirt with him as much as she could.

There was a great deal of separation between love and the appreciation of a physical form, as Aziraphale might have put it, and Crowley knew that. Still, when she'd catch the gardener's eyes widen beneath that ridiculous hat or his fingers curl involuntarily against his thighs, she'd felt her heart swell in a way she certainly would have denied if anyone had called her out on it.

Greedy Crowley, who was supposed to taste nothing but dust for the rest of his days, had eaten and drank his fill in the company of a white-haired, pink-cheeked angel, and really, God's plan must have been ineffable, because, despite the way he'd flaunted the rules for all these years, She'd never struck him down for it.

Aziraphale didn't love Crowley the way that Crowley loved him, but that was alright. Quiet wouldn't have been the first word anyone might have chosen to describe him, but this was a way he could show his affection.

His angel was ever so dense, after all.

Aziraphale loved Crowley like he loved all of Creation, but Crowley didn't believe he was remiss in thinking that the angel loved him just a little bit more.

The Apocalypse had come, and leaving Warlock behind had been a struggle, even considering what a little menace he had become. Still, they had had a job to do, and though Aziraphale had always been a worrier, he'd started the journey with Crowley.

(And if he tried not to think about the bandstand, about every accidentally-on-purpose cruel thing that Aziraphale had said to him, that was okay. Even if he could have, even though he'd wanted to, he couldn't have torn his angel's lingering vestiges of loyalty toward Heaven from him for anything. If Aziraphale had chosen Heaven, Crowley would have entreated whatever forces he'd needed to to make sure they never met in battle. If Aziraphale had chosen Heaven, Crowley would have let the angel skewer him through rather than lift a finger against him. It would have been worth it.)

The Apocalypse had come, though, and in the end, he'd chosen Crowley, and every moment in between was worth it for that one, the two of them suspended in time, humanity's hope and one little boy between them. The way things were always meant to be.

What wouldn't he have given up just to hear Aziraphale thumb his proverbial nose at Gabriel for just a little bit longer?

This moment, he supposed.

The bus ride back from Tadfield had been a solemn affair, even with the elation of physical contact sparking up and down Crowley's spine. What would come tomorrow was almost certain, and for all of their combined wiles and cleverness, the next step was anything but clear.

 _When alle is fayed and all is done, ye must choofe your faces wisely, for soon enouff ye will be playing with fyre_.

There had always been one face that he would willingly choose, wisdom be blessed, and there was a certain thread of logic to it. Still, Aziraphale was tired, and they had hours yet. For this brief, temporary moment, they were safe, and Crowley would keep it so for as long as the angel needed.

"What do you say to a cup of cocoa, angel?" he said, words reverberating in the quiet starkness of the Mayfair flat (his, but never quite).

Aziraphale laughed, but it was a weak thing, and if he could have, Crowley would have shouldered all of that worry himself. "I suppose we'd better not drink, hm? What with the plotting that lies in our future."

And there was no accompanying motion to that, none of the ill-concealed glee that he got from causing light mischief, and it made Crowley sick.

He made the cocoa the human way because Aziraphale would never settle for anything less, and he cared for him in the same way the moon might have loved the earth, always orbiting and desperate to give it something to look at. Milk, of course, because he'd been the one to implant the idea of water-based cocoa, the lactose-intolerant be damned, and he blew a kiss into the mug, cheerfully emblazoned with a cartoon snake as it was.

"Thank you," Aziraphale said, voice so low it was almost a whisper.

"Come sit on the balcony with me," Crowley entreated, flexing his hand to do _something_ with the endless desire that poured out of him. "We can watch the sky together, talk a little before we leap right into the thick of things."

"Is that wise? We don't have much time at all, really, and I'm not certain I've landed on a good solution."

"You're not in this alone, angel."

After all they'd been through, that was what gave Aziraphale pause. Perhaps they really did talk _properly_ far less than Crowley wanted to admit.

The shuffle out to the balcony might have been comedic from an outside perspective, but there was something to the nearness of their bodies, each reluctant to go too far from the other, that made something soften in Crowley's critical heart.

Aziraphale didn't love Crowley as Crowley loved him, but his angel did love him, and that could be enough.

"I don't think we've ever spent a proper night together, have we?" Aziraphale asked as he took his mug from Crowley's careful hands, practically heedless of the way he spluttered. "Oh, don't be crass. I only meant that for one reason or another, we've never seen the same set and rise of the sun together. I'm quite glad that we'll have this chance, at least."

"Don't talk like this will be the last one." Crowley meant for it to come out stern, perhaps bordering on playful confidence. He was almost certain that it landed somewhere closer to desperation. "We can do this every night after tomorrow if you'd like."

That, at least, got a fond smile out of Aziraphale. "Now who's speaking in innuendo?" he asked, half for the pleasure of watching Crowley burn. "But that would be nice all the same, I should think."

And for all that Crowley craved heat, he was a glacier, inching forward infinitesimally over the course of what he would like to claim as decades, but was far closer to millennia. He melted because that was what ice did when confronted by the sun, but if he wasn't careful, everything that had composed him - built him into a being of strength, swooning, and soft touches - was going to come pouring out of him in a tidal wave.

"Aziraphale," Crowley said, and his angel must have heard the yearning, must have tasted his desperation in the air like smoke that choked and blinded to all else.

He was smiling, but that could have changed at any moment.

Crowley said nothing further, afraid to ruin the precarious balance at this moment, perched somewhere between eternity and oblivion. In whatever came after total annihilation, _if_ anything came after, he wanted this to clutch against his chest and replay when sanity started to fray.

But Aziraphale came closer.

"Look at you, my dear," he said, all gentle propriety, and the ghost of a hand that never moved caressed Crowley's cheek. "I've been so selfish. We're both terribly afraid, aren't we?"

And the cocoa was nothing, not really, because it had just been a tiny drop in the infinite ocean of Crowley's affections, written across his face so clearly that it might as well have been in neon. _Don't read me_ , he begged. _If you do, I don't know how much slower I can make myself go_.

Crowley had never been much for poetry, but there were still words he knew by heart:

_That fawn of love! I'd sell my soul for him._

_The sight of him cheers even brooding men._

_His cheeks are white and red, like marble slabs_

_all smeared with lovers' blood._

_His teeth are lances ranged behind his lips. His eyes_

_transfix his lovers' hearts like spears._

Except Crowley loved the fawn and always had, so what kind of a fool did that make him?

"Not selfish," he managed. "Rather it be you than me."

Maybe that would have sounded callous to someone else, someone who didn't know him as intimately as Aziraphale did, but the angel had heard every shade of his ire, from the pits of Hell to every half-baked filter he had tried to form around his ardent admiration. This time, the hand that was raised was not a phantom, and Crowley couldn't stop himself from crying out even as he leaned into this most careful of touches.

"Shh, I've got you," the angel said, and Crowley's knees gave out from beneath him. "Too fast for you?"

"Whatever you need, angel," he panted, steadying himself on a broad forearm. "Whatever you want. Take it."

Aziraphale's smile was the birth of a star. "I'll go as slow as you need me to, love."

Crowley keened again, a horrible little noise he would be berating himself for if he had any sense outside of this moment. "Don't say that," he heaved. "You don't love me like I love you."

And Aziraphale, _bastard, bastard, bastard_ , knew the song of his heart:

" _With lowly spirit, lowered knee and head,_

_in fear I come; I offer You my dread._

_But facing You, I know I've no more worth_

_than any little worm that crawls the earth._

_O fullness of the world, Infinity —_

_What praise can come, if any can, from me?_

_Your splendor is not contained by the hosts on high,_

_and how much less capacity have I!_

_Infinite You, and infinite Your ways._

_Therefore the soul expands to sing Your praise._ "

"Don't blaspheme to me," Crowley croaked from behind a lens of tears. "'S not proper, or whatever."

"Crowley."

He fell silent.

"My dear, I'll go as slowly as you need me to. It's only fair after all I've put you through. But, if you're amenable, I should very much like to kiss you with what little time we have left."

 _Fuck yes_ , Crowley was amenable.

If that kiss held even an ounce of the love that Aziraphale felt, if it convinced an ugly, fallen thing of his worth, then that was between the London air and the two of them. If they parted no more than a foot while they plotted their own survival, then that was for the stars to witness.

And if they spent that final night (the first night of the rest of time) curled around each other, keys and locks both, then it was only natural that they finally fell into place.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on twitter! @kingblaiddyd for shenanigans, omens and otherwise
> 
> edit: forgot to note that the poems are from solomon ibn gabirol’s vulture in a cage, translated by scheindlin!!
> 
> 1/19 edit: SORRY AGAIN but i recently started a gomens server so if you like my work, join me in the mayfair flat!!   
> https://discord.gg/gq8x3uV


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